American Passage_ The History of Ellis I - Vincent J. Cannato [48]
As time passed, inspection methods would improve and immigration officials would be given more tools with which to inspect, and possibly exclude, immigrants. Public health officials had a duty to cure and heal, but they were also part of the ever-expanding obstacle course through which immigrants who arrived at America’s gate had to pass.
N EW LAWS OR NOT, Senator Chandler would no longer have to worry about Colonel John Weber. Although Chandler may have been saddened that his fellow Republican, President Benjamin Harrison, lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland in the 1892 election, it also meant that Weber would soon lose his job at Ellis Island. Weber would be replaced by Joseph Senner, an editor of the German-language newspaper New Yorker Staats-Zeitung.
The good news was that by mid-1893, the typhus epidemic had been contained and the cholera scare had passed. The bad news was that the national economy had now plunged into a nasty depression, the worst economic downturn until the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The epidemic scares of 1892 had cut in half the numbers of immigrants arriving in New York. Now the economic depression cut that low number even further, and the downward trend continued into the mid-1890s. As many potential immigrants stayed in Europe, growing numbers of foreigners already in the United States decided to pack up and return to their homelands. Newspapers ran headlines such as “More Going Back Than Coming Over” and “Many Leaving the Country.” Senner credited this trend to stricter enforcement of immigration laws, not bad economic times. He approvingly pronounced that “heavy immigration has been made practically an impossibility for the future”—a declaration that would have amused Senner’s successors at Ellis Island.
Although over a million fewer immigrants came to the United States in the 1890s than in the previous decade, the decline masked a deeper and more enduring trend. During the 1880s, almost 3.8 million immigrants from northern and western Europe entered the United States, compared to 956,000 from southern and eastern Europe. By the 1890s, despite the overall decrease in immigration, southern and east European immigrants outnumbered northern and west Europeans by 1.9 million to 1.6 million. By the first decade of the twentieth century, there were three eastern and southern European immigrants for every one from northern and western Europe.
The top three countries of origin for immigrants during the 1880s were Germany, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. By the 1900s, it was Italy, Russia, and Austria-Hungary. In 1884, 13 percent of immigrants came from Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Russia-Poland. In 1891, the figure was 39 percent, and in 1898, 60 percent of all immigrants to America hailed from those regions.
These changes were not lost on most Americans. In 1892, before the depression struck, the New York Times noted that “an increasing proportion of the total volume is of immigration evidently undesirable. Americans are pretty well agreed that the immigration from Italy is very largely, and from Russia and its dependencies almost altogether, of a kind which we are better without.” Just a few months later, the paper repeated its claims about these new immigrants:
The New Yorker who goes to the Barge Office these days gets a good idea of the class of people now seeking homes in